Mirrors & Motherhood

My family has a legacy of mental illness, teen motherhood, addiction and violence going back many generations. I believe I am transforming my family's legacy. Since getting pregnant the first time at age 16, it has been my life's mission to raise children who are happy and whole, rather than broken, when they go out into the world. Instead of continuing to unconsciously perpetuate the cycle of violence with my children, I have worked to heal my wounds, disarm my triggers and change my behaviors. But I still have violent communication to unlearn and I struggle with shame about that. It breaks my heart when I lose control of my emotional reactions and hurt anyone, most especially my children.

I have a 14 year old daughter. She is one of the brightest lights in my life. We have a great relationship with very little conflict. For a teenage girl she is remarkably easy to live with. But she is still a teenager and she has her ways of digging at me now and again.

It is in her sarcasm. She speaks a version of the truth through a veil of dark humor. It is penetrating and sometimes it is quite painful. She has this way of finding the places where I believe I fail as a mother and digging at them when she is in a bad mood. Sometimes I am stunned at her capability to call me out on my shadow. It is tough to hold space for.

The other night she was in a dark mood, and laughed out of the blue as we were preparing dinner. I asked her what was funny. She said she had a mean thought go through her mind and she thought it was funny. We talked about how she can't control how mean thoughts come, only what she does with them. Then she asked if I wanted to know what she thought. I said probably not, as I was tired and experiencing a bit of an emotional crash after a full weekend. She decided to tell me anyway.

"When you talk to me in your annoyed-with-me-voice, I want to go crawl into a cave and die."

Yeah. Not funny. It broke my heart actually. I started crying. It makes me sad that something I do could cause her to feel that way. It's another example of how I communicate through tone in harmful ways, something I have already been looking at in my relationships to both Knight and the Imps.

Some days it is difficult looking at the mirror in my daughter. Like me, she is an empath, which has its light and its shadow. As an empath, she intuitively knows things about people and can use that knowledge to help them, or to manipulate and hurt them. When I am angry and scared, I can be incredibly mean. I can spin some fantastic stories by manipulating the truth about a person's shadow behaviors. I am recognizing and healing the violence that persists in my communication when I am triggered. I don't like seeing my daughter struggle with what she has learned from living with my violence.

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To balance this sharing, on the light side of mirrors and motherhood...

Most days I look at the mirrors in my daughter and I love what I see. Like me, but in her unique ways, she is immensely clever, creative, intuitive, and emotionally intelligent. She is a fabulous human being. I like spending time with her.

Sometimes, she lets me know that she really sees me and how I have tried so very hard to be a good mother.

For Mother's Day, she wrote me a thank you letter.

"Thank you.

Thank you for always being there for me whether I'm talking to you about boring everyday things or just sitting with me while I cry.

Thank you for putting up with my snobbiness and sarcasm.

Thank you for always trying. You may not be a perfect mother, but you try and that's good enough for me.

Thank you for putting up with my complaining and ungratefulness.

Thank you for letting me be who I am without question.

Thank you for always supporting me.

Thank you for being who you are.

Thank you for trying to grow and be everything you can possibly be.

Thank you for being so kind and giving to me, your friends and your community.

Thank you for telling me I'm smart and beautiful when I don't believe it.

And most of all thank you for giving me life and letting me be free.

I'm so sorry that you couldn't have had a mother like I do. I'm sorry your mother couldn't always give you what you needed. And didn't always put you first like you put me first. I'm sorry she wasn't all she could be. But I know she loved you, just like you love me. And I think you should always try to remember that. And if she wasn't who she was, then you wouldn't be who you are, right? I know she loved you. And I love you, too. I could not ask for a better mother. Really.

I appreciate you. I appreciate everything you've ever done for me. I appreciate what you are."


Pretty amazing, especially the paragraph about my own mother. Another mirror that I am grateful for.

***Image Credit: Picasso's Girl Before a Mirror

Censoring the Dictionary

"A school district in Riverside County has pulled the Merriam-Webster's 10th edition dictionary from school shelves because it includes the term oral sex. The Menifee Union School District took the action last week after a parent complained about the dictionary.

'It's just not age-appropriate,' said school spokeswoman Betti Cadmus told the newspaper. 'It's hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we'll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature.'

The school board will decide later whether to return the dictionaries to the classrooms. One board member told the Press-Enterprise that there are probably more objectionable terms in the dictionary." Los Angeles Times Blog

Wow, really? We are going to start censoring dictionaries because they contain sexual language? This is an entire school district, not just an elementary school. I am flabbergasted that people are this uptight about providing information to school-age children about the most natural thing in the world.

If a child has the notion to find the definition for oral sex in a dictionary, then it's likely time they learn what it is...because they are already thinking about it! Besides, it's not as if they can't ask a fellow schoolmate or look it up on the Internet. When are people going to realize they can't "protect" their children from learning about sex? And learning from a dictionary and their parents in an appropriate context is a hell of a lot better than learning from their peers with the misinformation that abounds? Take it from someone whose mom kept her out of sex ed and got pregnant at age 16 because she didn't know anything about birth control...it is never a matter of keeping children from learning about sex, it's a matter of who they learn about sex from!

Here's a more comprehensive report on the issue.

Raising Sex Positive Kids

Someone wrote to the Imps Yahoo list recently asking for advice about talking to his 8 year old son about his cross-dressing. This is my slightly edited response...

I don't think there is anything more important than raising our children to be happy, healthy and whole human beings. It's the most significant way we can make the world a better place. It's a big part of why I do what I do as an Impress and feel so passionately about the big psychological issues around sex and relationship. Since we come from a powerfully strong history of family dysfunction and identity/sexual repression in this country, it takes a whole lot of consciousness to counteract our own and our culture's conditioning to find health and happiness.

I have raised two children, one of whom is a well-adjusted second year college student, and the other a fresh(wo)man in high school who has no apparent angst about her life with me (although there is plenty of sarcasm). I can speak from the experience of making choices that have resulted in happy, healthy kids/adults (others on this list can back me up on this claim).

My philosophy is that we teach our children what is appropriate, healthy and "normal." The majority of children raised in a queer home will believe being queer is as normal as being straight (and the minority who don't likely have someone close to them, homophobic and/or religious family members who don't agree with the lifestyle, giving them contradictory points of view in a shaming sort of way). The same applies to any other lifestyle, including cross-dressing. There are opposing cultural influences to battle, but I have found that speaking about these things consciously at as early an age as possible--not just living my life openly, but actually talking to my kids about it all, including what what is right and wrong with what they see in the media and the world at large--resulted in them being authentic to themselves and accepting of all kinds of people.

My strongest argument for being open about who you are with your children is that you don't know if your children are queer, gender-queer, or any other identification for that matter. If you choose fear and repress your authenticity with them, you are teaching them to live fearfully and repress who they are (which doesn't just apply to alternative lifestyles, but to staying in unhappy/unhealthy marriages or careers or whatever). Our children learn far more from our example than our words. Isn't that exactly what we are trying to change? Haven't we had enough oppression/repression and fear? Do we want our kids to live in fear and have to struggle to be honored for who they are like we have/are? Or do we want them to live in joy and openness?

I have known I am queer, kinky and poly since my oldest was 5 years old. I have always had queer, gender-queer, cross-dressing, trans, poly and kinky friends. I have chosen openness, within age appropriate boundaries, with my kids, and now the only people they think of negatively or as "abnormal" are bigots and haters, like the opponents of gay marriage.

Turns out both my kids are queer. My son came out to my family when he was 11. My daughter came out this last year. Would they be so comfortable with their queer-ness at an early age if they were not raised in a home where authenticity is both expressed and encouraged, and the queer lifestyle is both acknowledged and considered normal?

I also believe that even if a parent isn't queer or alternatively identified in any way, exposing their children to age appropriate expressions of alternative lifestyles is appropriate both to teach acceptance of all people, and so that kids won't feel bizarre and wrong if they find these tendencies within themselves. It's no different than schools teaching about different cultures to nurture acceptance. There are Pride festivals, and age appropriate movies, television shows, books, etc. that have queer and gender-queer characters if you seek them out.

I have made the choices I have because I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian home where most of who I am is/was rejected by my parents and it caused a lot of wounding in me that has taken years to overcome. Even now the beautiful work I do as an Impress is ignored by my family, which I believe is community-healing, changing-the-world-for-the-better kind of work that a family should be proud of. I am proud to tell my children about it, and have been open with them since I started volunteering for Club Risque 8 years ago, even though I don't share the details. I told them I volunteered for sex parties and I told them why as soon as they were old enough to understand.

I am as open about being sex-positive as I am about everything else. In fact, I choose to be more open with my kids about sex-positive points of view than most parents. The reality is that we have a culture that is sexually dysfunctional and I have to work damn hard to counteract all the bullshit that is out there. We worry about what we expose our children to at home, but what are they exposed to out in the world, at school, in the media, everywhere they look and listen when they aren't in our presence? How do we counteract the bullshit without intentionally exposing our kids to positive, healthy views about sex, alternative lifestyles, kink, etc.? Do we want our culture to decide what our kids believe, especially about us and our alternative choices? I would guess not if we're already conscious enough to seek out and participate in a sex-positive community like the Imps. If we hide who we are now, what are we going to tell them when they are teens/adults? How are we going to feel if they reject us and others because we let our culture brainwash them that we are wrong for our lifestyle choices?

I know the desire to keep our kids safe in a bubble, to protect their innocence. But really, that innocence is mostly, if not entirely, an illusion once they start school. Other children are telling them stuff about sex and other topics. Kids who come from dysfunctional homes are bringing their dysfunctional ideas and behaviors into the classroom, whether bullying, or sexual harrassment, or whatever. Heck, even most so-called children's programming in tv and film is actually filled with violence. Most cartoons involve fighting and violence of some kind. Why do we accept violence everywhere but are so frickin' squeamish about sharing healthy ideas about sex and relationship? It doesn't make any sense to me. We should be paying more attention to what messages our children are receiving, counteract those we know to be unhealthy and encourage healthy perspectives any way we can.

I could say so much more about this. I could likely write a book about it. But I think you get the jist and if I've planted a seed for other parents, or some-day parents, or grandparents, or anyone who has a relationship with a child, then I'm a happy Impress.